This diploma project refers to a different time. In this time, nothing vanishes. Nothing magically disappears from our toilets and our trash cans to unknown direction. Everything stays here, piled up, emblems of a coming community. And we all dance around them, around the beautiful nothingness, in love with the marks that time cannot erase, being true ecologists.

 Springboard to this project was the video-essay of philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in the documentary Examined Life. There, Žižek addresses the relationship that mankind retains with its waste, the problematic issues of modern ecology and possible theoretical outlets. The video starts with a general shot of a trash pile and Žižek saying “This is where we should start feeling at home”.

 In regard now to the actual product of this academic project, there has been designed a recycling and sorting center in which, most importantly, trash are in open display. To this is added a second-hand market with several workshops that deal with the practices of processing recycled material or reusing and repairing existing products. The market’s and workshops’ main input comes from the recycling center. Moreover a student and volunteer/visitors’ housing unit is added along with offices for the public transport company, that owns the site. The recycling center works on an “industrial tourism” model that follows the one from agrotourism. In other words visitors work in the center and in return they live there and take part in the industrial life, its systems and chains of recycling.

 With this project, besides the architectural proposal, I tried to find a different point of view on the ecological discourse. And through the lens of trash, which was used to zoom in to the city, an endoscopic view of existence might have been occurred.